Bloodhorse recap of Day One: Perception, not integrity, called major issue
This year's International Simulcast Conference is taking place this week in Saratoga Springs, NY -- at the Saratoga Hilton located right on the city's main street, Broadway.
There was a full-house for Monday's opening sessions and TRA Veep Chris Scherf got the proceedings rolling with some good-natured kidding about the location -- reminding conference attendees that they were getting bargain rates in the hotel compared to the prices paid just a few short weeks ago during the racing season.
Day One Panels... A few quick hits on some of the comments made Monday afternoon
True noted that tracks are still using manual systems to close betting and while the tote companies would be happy to go to an automatically-triggered close at zero minutes to post, most racetracks oppose that approach.
Dobbins said that for security and post-race analysis racetracks should move to time-stamp their video signals to coincide with their tote logs.
Hill: Some people point to the financial markets as a model for how racing should handle its data but "financial markets deal with one closing bell on a Thursday afternoon, we live with 400-500 closing bells on a Thursday afternoon."
Linnell believes that going to decimal odds would eliminate some of the perception problems. An odds shift from 7-2 to 3-1 on the tote board might actually reflect only a minor shift from 3.52 to 3.49.
Starting in November all win pools will be tracked and late odds shifts looked at in relation to percentage shifts pre-determined to be outside the norm.
Chris Scherf, Exec VP, TRA
Scherf wrapped the afternoon re-iterating some of the points made earlier and noting that there was a need for better synchronization between odds cycle and video feed odds displays.
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